Garbage Collection is a common occurrence on Solid State Drives (SSDs). When an SSD runs out of free erase blocks, it performs Garbage Collection (GC) to free up new erase blocks for new writes to use. This process may slow down the read/write performance of the SSD, since the write/read must wait for Garbage Collection to complete before the request may be serviced. Features such as Storage Intelligence help to address this problem with host initiated Garbage Collection. However, this requires that the host issue a Garbage Collection command to notify the device to begin Garbage Collection.
A need remains for a way to improve the performance of large databases and to balance the two objectives of minimizing latency and keeping cost down.